Hmm...Interesting

I have been on a non-fiction bent lately. I decided to bridge the gap back to fiction with a book called Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. I picked it up last year when Borders was going out of business and promptly placed it on the "Summer Reads" bookshelf which has since become the "Thanksgiving Reads", "Christmas Vacay Reads", "Spring Break Reads" and very recently back to the "Summer Reads". I came across this passage in one of the chapters (Consider the Stars) that made me revel in the complexity that is social structures as well as the pointlessness of them. Here it is...

"Every night before going to bed, Hugh steps outside to consider the stars. His interest is not scientific-- he doesn't pinpoint the constellations or make casual references to Canopus; rather, he just regards the mass of them, occasionally pausing to sigh. When asked if there's life on other planets, he says, "Yes, of course. Look at the odds."

It hardly seems fair we'd get the universe to ourselves but on a personal level I'm highly disturbed by the thought of extraterrestrial life. If there are, in fact, billions of other civilizations, where does that leave our celebrities? If worth is measured on a sliding scale of recognition, what would it mean if we were all suddenly obscure? How would we know our place?

In trying to make sense of this, I think back to 1968 Labor Day celebration at Raleigh Country Club. I was at the snack bar, listening to a group of sixth-graders who lived in another part of town and sat discussing significant changes in their upcoming school year. According to the girl named Janet, neither Pam Dobbins nor J.J. Jackson had be invited to the Fourth of July party hosted by the Duffy twins, who later told Kath Matthew that both Pam and J.J. were out of the picture as far as seventh grade was concerned. "Totally, completely out," Janet sad. "Poof"

I didn't know any Pam Dobbins or J. J. Jackson, but the reverential tone of Janet's voice sent me into a state of mild shock. Call me naive, but it had simply never occurred to me that other schools might have their own celebrity circles. At the age of twelve, I thought the group at E. C. Brooks was if not nationally known, then at least its own private phenomenon. Why else would our lives revolve around it so completely? I myself was not a member of my school's popular crowd, but I recall thinking that, whoever they were, Janet's popular crowd couldn't begin to compete with ours. But what if I was wrong? What if I'd wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn't really matter? Try as I might, I still can't wrap my mind around it."

When I read this I thought about all the times that I tried to gain the approval of people who may have mattered to me then but now I can't even recall why. Or even worse, trying to gain the approval of people who really didn't matter to me then or now. How foolish. I wish I could say that I grew out of this foolishness around when my frontal lobe developed (yes both the dorsal lateral and the ventral medial) but that also isn't true. I have recently become a fan of old people because they do as they want and say what they think. Maybe the freedom you get when you live in a nursing home and smell faintly of urine and disinfectant isn't the freedom from reality but rather the freedom from worrying about what people will think. I'm not promoting anti-social behavior or a crime spree here, but just saying maybe this world would be easier to navigate if I stopped worrying about others and focused on loving what I do and doing what I love.